The state’s top Democratic legal official says the giveaway in states likely to decide the US election is a ‘scam’.
A $1m-a-day voter sweepstakes operated by a political group established by billionaire Elon Musk can continue, a judge in the state of Pennsylvania has ruled.
Musk’s giveaway has widely been seen by many as an unsubtle attempt to secure extra votes for Republican candidate Donald Trump, who Musk has thrown his vocal and financial support behind.
Musk has given $75m to America PAC, a political action committee that has been funding various Republican candidates, including former President Trump.
Winners ‘not chosen by chance’
The Tesla CEO has already gifted $16m to registered swing-state voters who qualified for the giveaway by signing his political petition.
Pennsylvania‘s Common Pleas Court Judge Angelo Foglietta’s decision on Monday came after a surprising day of testimony in a state court in which Musk’s aides acknowledged hand-picking the winners of the contest based on who would be the best spokespeople for his super PAC’s agenda.
Previously, the 53-year-old billionaire had claimed the winners would be chosen at random.
District Attorney Larry Krasner, a Democrat, called the process a scam “designed to actually influence a national election” and asked that it be shut down.
As it was, the judge ruled in favour of Musk and his America PAC.
Musk’s lawyer, Chris Gober, said the final two recipients before the presidential election would be announced in Arizona on Monday and Michigan on Tuesday.
“The $1 million recipients are not chosen by chance,” said Gober.
“We know exactly who will be announced as the $1 million recipient today and tomorrow.”
‘They were scammed’
Chris Young, the director and treasurer of America PAC, testified that the recipients were vetted ahead of time, to “feel out their personality, [and] make sure they were someone whose values aligned” with the group.
Musk’s lawyers, defending the effort, called it “core political speech” given that participants were asked to sign a petition endorsing the US Constitution.
More than 1 million people from the seven battleground states – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Michigan – have registered for the sweepstakes by signing a petition saying they support the right to free speech and to bear arms, the first two amendments to the US Constitution.
District Attorney Krasner has questioned how the PAC might use their data, which it will have on hand well past the election.
“They were scammed for their information,” Krasner said. “It has almost unlimited use.”
ALLENTOWN, Pa. (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump made their final pitches to voters Monday in the same parts of Pennsylvania at roughly the same time, focusing on the state that could make or break their chances during the last full day of the presidential campaign.
“Over the past four years, Americans have suffered one catastrophic failure, betrayal and humiliation after another,” said the Republican nominee, sounding raspy yet energetic after speaking for hours each day.
“We do not have to settle for weakness, incompetence, decline and decay,” he went on. “With your vote tomorrow, we can fix every single problem our country faces and lead America, and indeed the while world, to new heights of glory.”
AP correspondent Norman Hall reports on Donald Trump’s first campaign stop of the day, in North Carolina, in his final campaign push through key states.
The crowd exploded in cheers when the Republican nominee said the country should tell Harris, “You’re fired,” his catchphrase from “The Apprentice,” the reality television show that made him a nationally recognized star.
Trump started Monday in North Carolina and he’s scheduled to hold his last rally of the election in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he concluded his 2016 and 2020 campaigns.
Harris, the Democratic nominee, is spending all of Monday in Pennsylvania, and she was en route to Pittsburgh while Trump was speaking there. She’s holding her final rally in Philadelphia later in the evening.
“This is it,” Harris said in Pittsburgh in front of the Carrie Furnaces, a historic steel facility that nodded to the city’s industrial legacy. “Tomorrow is Election Day and the momentum is on our side.”
“We must finish strong,” she added. “Make no mistake, we will win.”
With 19 Electoral College votes, the state is the biggest prize of any battleground. A Trump victory there would puncture the Democrats’ “blue wall” and make it harder for Harris to win the necessary 270 votes.
“If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole ball of wax,” Trump said during an event in Reading, in the state’s southeast corner.
Both candidates visited the area, which is home to thousands of Latinos, including a sizable Puerto Rican population. Harris and her allies have repeatedly hit Trump for a comedian’s dig at Puerto Rico during the former president’s marquee Madison Square Garden event. The comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”
“It was absurd,” said German Vega, a Dominican American who lives in Reading and became a U.S. citizen in 2015. “It bothered so many people — even many Republicans. It wasn’t right, and I feel that Trump should have apologized to Latinos.”
But Emilio Feliciano, 43, waited outside Reading’s Santander Arena for a chance to take a photo of Trump’s motorcade. He dismissed the comments about Puerto Rico despite his family being Puerto Rican, saying he cares about the economy and that’s why he will vote for Trump.
With one day until the election, both presidential candidates are making their final pitches to voters. AP correspondent Julie Walker reports.
“Is the border going to be safe? Are you going to keep crime down? That’s what I care about,” he said.
What to know about the 2024 Election
Harris told the crowd, “I stand here proud of my long-standing commitment to Puerto Rico and her people.”
“And I will be a president for all Americans,” she said, adding that “momentum is on our side. Can you feel it?”
Trump, meanwhile, stuck to talking about his proposed crackdown on immigration. He called to the stage Patty Morin, the mother of 37-year-old Rachel Morin, who was found dead a day after she went missing during a trip to go hiking. Officials say the suspect in her death, Victor Antonio Martinez Hernandez, entered the U.S. illegally after allegedly killing a woman in his home country of El Salvador.
About 77 million Americans have voted early. A victory by either side would be unprecedented.
Trump winning would make him the first incoming president to have been indicted and convicted of a felony, after his hush-money trial in New York. He will gain the power to end other federal investigations pending against him. Trump would also become only the second president in history to win nonconsecutive White House terms, after Grover Cleveland in the late 19th century.
Harris is vying to become the first woman, first Black woman and first person of South Asian descent to reach the Oval Office — four years after she broke the same barriers in national office by becoming President Joe Biden’s second in command.
Heading into Monday, Harris has mostly stopped mentioning Trump by name, calling him instead “the other guy.” She is promising to solve problems and seek consensus.
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump arrives to speak at a campaign rally at J.S. Dorton Arena, Monday, Nov. 4, 2024, in Raleigh, N.C. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said on a call with reporters that not saying Trump’s name was deliberate because voters “want to see in their leader an optimistic, hopeful, patriotic vision for the future.”
Harris also offered some insights into her personal formation as a politician that she doesn’t often divulge. In Scranton, she talked about once being a longshot while running for San Francisco district attorney in 2002 and how she “used to campaign with my ironing board.”
“I’d walk to the front of the grocery store, outside, and I would stand up my ironing board because, you see, an ironing board makes a really great standing desk,” the vice president said, recalling how she would tape her posters to the outside of the board, fill the top with flyers and “require people to talk to me as they walked in and out.”
Attendees holding the flag of Puerto Rico cheer as Allentown, Pa. Mayor Matt Tuerk speaks during a campaign rally for Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris in Memorial Hall at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., Monday, Nov. 4, 2024. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
In Allentown, Harris rallied with rapper Fat Joe. She then made her own visit to Reading after Trump’s rally had concluded, visiting Old San Juan Cafe, a Puerto Rican restaurant, with Ocasio-Cortez. Both Fat Joe, whose real name is Joseph Cartagena, and Ocasio-Cortez are of Puerto Rican heritage.
Supporters chanted “Sí se puede” and “Kamala” as the vice president’s motorcade pulled up. Once inside, Harris chatted with some diners, even mixing in “Gracias” and a few Spanish words. The vice president later ordered cassava, yellow rice and pork, saying, “I’m very hungry” as she noted that she’s been too busy campaigning to find time for many meals.
Harris did some of her own canvassing afterward, stopping at two homes in Reading while flanked by campaign volunteers.
“It’s the day before the election and I just wanted to come by and say I hope to earn your vote,” she said at one house.
The woman replied, “You already got my vote” and said her husband would be casting his ballot the next day.
Standing in line for Harris’ Allentown rally, 54-year-old Ron Kessler, an Air Force veteran and Republican-turned-Democrat, said he planned to vote for just the second time in his life. Kessler said that, for a long time, he didn’t vote, thinking the country “would vote for the correct candidate.”
But “now that I’m older and much more wiser, I believe it’s important, it’s my civic duty. And it’s important that I vote for myself and I vote for the democracy and the country.”
___
Superville reported from Scranton, Pennsylvania. Barrow reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Makiya Seminera in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Zeke Miller, Will Weissert and Michelle L. Price in Washington contributed to this report.
Donald Trump and Kamala Harris held competing rallies across Pennsylvania on Monday, making their final pitches in the key swing state as polls indicate an extremely close contest.
The two candidates laid out starkly contrasting visions for America’s future on the eve of election day. Trump rambled through dark and dystopian speeches painting migrants as dangerous criminals while also launching personal attacks on a number of high-profile Democratic women. Harris delivered a more positive closing argument, shifting focus away from the threat posed by the ex-president, who is not mentioned in her final ad, and insisting “we all have so much more in common than what separates us”.
Trump, at times appearing hoarse and low-energy, scheduled four rallies on Monday: one in Raleigh, North Carolina, two in Pennsylvania and a late-evening event in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has continued to boast about his crowd sizes, but reports suggest some of his final events have been plagued by empty seats and early departures from audience members during his lengthy, meandering speeches.
Harris stayed in Pennsylvania with several rallies and events in the critical state that could decide the election. Lady Gaga, Oprah Winfrey, Ricky Martin and other celebrities were slated to appear at her final event at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the famous steps from the Rocky movie were lit up blue and a large “President for All” banner was displayed.
As the Harris campaign and its surrogates have continued to appeal to female voters, Trump revived familiar insults against notable women, sometimes with violent language.
In North Carolina, he attacked former first lady Michelle Obama, saying: “She hit me the other day. I was going to say to my people, am I allowed to hit her now? They said, take it easy, sir.” He also suggested the Democratic congresswoman Nancy Pelosi should have been jailed for ripping up a copy of his 2020 State of the Union address: “She’s a bad, sick woman, she’s crazy as a bedbug.”
And Trump repeated his line that Harris is a “low IQ individual”, followed by an incoherent tangent seemingly imagining her struggling to sleep: “I don’t want to have her say, You know, I had an idea last night while I was sleeping, turning, tossing, sweating,” he said, without finishing the sentence.
Trump leaned into his taunts as he continues to face scrutiny over his recent comment suggesting that Liz Cheney, the former GOP congresswoman and a Harris supporter, should face rifles “shooting at her”. Appearing on ABC’s The View on Monday, Cheney said, “Women are going to save the day” on Tuesday.
In North Carolina, Trump also threatened the newly elected president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, suggesting he would impose tariffs on all Mexican goods “if they don’t stop this onslaught of criminals and drugs” – part of his trade proposals that economists have warned could significantly raise costs for US consumers.
Later in Reading, Pennsylvania, Trump fantasized about wrestlers who could “take the migrants in a fight”. He repeated racist tropes about immigrants and affirmed his threat of unprecedented mass deportations, saying Tuesday would be “liberation day”. He falsely suggested Democrats support “open borders” so undocumented people can fraudulently vote.
He later spoke of the boxer Mike Tyson and seemingly in response to a comment from an audience member, suggested Tyson take on the vice-president: “That guy could fight … Put Mike in the ring with Kamala.”
Trump in Raleigh, North Carolina. Photograph: Jonathan Drake/Reuters
At around the same time, Harris was rallying in Allentown, roughly 40 miles away, critiquing Trumpism without directly naming her opponent: “America is ready for a new way forward, where we see our fellow American not as an enemy but as a neighbor. We are ready for a president who understands that the true measure of the strength of the leader is not based on who you beat down. It is based on who you lift up.”
Later, Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, earned loud applause at a rally in Georgia, when he attacked Harris by bringing up Joe Biden’s recent gaffe, in which he appeared to call Trump supporters “garbage”.
“In two days, we are going to take out the trash in Washington DC, and the trash is named is Kamala Harris,” said the Ohio senator, in a remark that was condemned by Democrats and pundits.
The back-and-forth trash talking originated with a comedian’s racist joke at Trump’s recent New York rally, calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”, a comment that many Harris surrogates cited on Monday while appealing to Puerto Rican voters in Pennsylvania.
The vice-president also stopped at a Puerto Rican restaurant with Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and directly joined canvassing in a residential area in Reading, telling voters at one home: “I wanted to go door-knocking!”
By his evening rally in Pittsburgh, Trump returned to his crowd size obsession, making false claims about low turnout at Harris’s nearby rally that hadn’t yet begun. He then mocked Beyoncé, who rallied for Harris in Texas: “Everyone’s expecting a couple songs and there were no songs. There was no happiness.” He added, “We don’t need a star. I never had a star.”
The final scramble to turn out voters comes as Trump continues to make false claims about voter fraud, raising fears about how he might challenge the results if Harris wins. In a call with reporters on Monday, the Harris campaign said it was prepared to combat any efforts by Trump to discredit the outcome.
“We have hundreds of lawyers across the country ready to protect election results against any challenge that Trump might bring,” said Dana Remus, a senior campaign adviser and outside counsel. “This will not be the fastest process, but the law and the facts are on our side.”
Legal challenges were designed to undermine faith in the electoral process, she added: “Keep in mind that the volume of cases does not equate to a volume of legitimate concerns. In fact, it just shows how desperate they’re becoming.”
There are also growing fears that political violence will escalate on election day and beyond, as misinformation and conspiracy theories are expected to spread while counting is under way. Election officials in one Nevada county said on Monday that threats have become so severe that polling places have installed “panic buttons” to automatically call 911 in emergencies.
At Trump’s Pittsburgh rally, Michael Barringer, a 55-year-old coalminer, expressed his disdain for undocumented immigrants in explaining his support for Trump: “You’ve got millions and millions of illegal aliens crossing the border. They don’t speak English. They don’t say a pledge allegiance to the flag. They freeload off of us. I’m all for legal immigration, but not coming across the border illegally, taking American jobs.”
Elizabeth Slaby, 81, was the first in line at Harris’s Allentown rally, arriving at about 6am. She said she was a registered Republican for more than 50 years, but changed her registration after the January 6 attack: “I never thought I’d see a woman president and now I’m so, so excited.”
Lauren Gambino, Sam Levine and David Smith contributed reporting
Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage:
“538 is excited to unveil our forecast for Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. Our forecast starts out with a slight lead for Harris, reflecting her current edge in polls but uncertainty about how the rest of the election could impact the state of the race. With 75 days to go, we think anything from a clear Trump victory to a clear Harris win is possible (while a close win either way is most likely).”
In the image below, the Toss-up tan color is used where neither candidate currently has a 60% or higher chance of winning. The colored gradients are used to show higher probabilities for Harris or Trump, deepening as the likelihood of winning increases: Light (60%+), Medium (75%+), Dark (95%+).
The map updates at 5:00 PM Eastern Time daily. Click the image for an interactive version.
Boeing workers gather on a picket line near the entrance to a Boeing facility during an ongoing strike on October 24, 2024 in Seattle, Washington.
David Ryder | Getty Images
Boeing‘s more than seven-week machinist strike is set to hit Friday’s U.S. jobs report — the last one that will be released before Nov. 5 presidential election and the Federal Reserve’s meeting next week. The company’s impending job cuts, meanwhile, will take months more to show up.
Some 44,000 U.S. workers were on strike when the Labor Department conducted its survey in mid-October. About 33,000 of them are Boeing machinists, who walked off the job on Sept. 13 after overwhelmingly voting against a union-endorsed labor contract and in favor of their first strike since 2008.
Economists expect the U.S. to have added 100,000 jobs in October. Bank of America this week forecast that payroll tallies will be at least 50,000 lower than they would have otherwise been because of the strikes and affects of both Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton.
Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller said in an Oct. 14 speech that those factors could have a 100,000-job impact on the October report and called the reductions a “significant but temporary loss of jobs.” He said they “may have a small effect on the unemployment rate, but I’m not sure it will be that visible.”
Boeing’s machinist strike has complicated the plane maker’s already difficult position as its new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, tries to steer the giant U.S. manufacturer and exporter out of safety, quality and financial crises. The unionized machinists, mostly in the Seattle area, voted 64% against a new proposal last week, which included 35% wage increases, compared with a 25% wage hike in an earlier tentative agreement.
In an aerial view, a Boeing 737 Max fuselage is seen on a railcar during an ongoing strike by Boeing factory workers in Seattle on Oct. 24, 2024.
David Ryder | Getty Images
The Biden administration has gotten involved, urging the two sides to reach a deal.
“With the continued assistance of Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su, your Union bargaining committee had a productive face-to-face meeting with the company to address key bargaining issues,” the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers District 751 said late Tuesday.
Su had met with both sides before the last proposal was brought to a vote on Oct. 23.
Boeing’s impact on U.S. employment numbers is set to continue. CEO Ortberg said earlier this month that the company will cut 10% of its global workforce, or 17,000 people, though job-loss warning letters aren’t expected to go out until mid-November.
“One of the things I’ve heard from a lot of employees is there’s just too much overhead. It slows them down in being able to get their work done,” he said on an Oct. 23 quarterly call. “So we’re going to really focus this workforce reduction in streamlining those overhead activities, consolidating things that can be consolidated.”
Layoffs and their announcements are more complicated to factor into federal employment surveys than strikes because “we don’t have a good sense of when they occur,” noted Bank of America economist Stephen Juneau.
The impact of Boeing’s strike could lead to further cuts in the fragile aerospace supply chain.
Boeing fuselage maker Spirit AeroSystems earlier this week put about 700 Wichita, Kansas, workers on a 21-day furlough. A spokesman for the company, which Boeing is in the process of acquiring, told CNBC last week that Spirit is considering hundreds of additional furloughs or layoffs if the Boeing strike lasts past Nov. 25.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has given a profane and conspiracy-laden speech two days before the presidential election, as his Democratic rival Kamala Harris spoke at a historically Black church in the battleground state of Michigan.
Opinion polls show the pair locked in a tight race, with Vice President Harris, 60, bolstered by strong support among women voters while former President Trump, 78, gains ground with Hispanic voters, especially men.
In remarks on Sunday that bore no resemblance to his standard speech in the campaign’s closing stretch, Trump spoke about reporters being shot and suggested he “shouldn’t have left” the White House after his 2020 loss to President Joe Biden.
The former president also resurrected old grievances about being prosecuted after trying to overturn his defeat four years ago.
Trump intensified his verbal attacks against a “grossly incompetent” national leadership and the American media, steering his Pennsylvania rally at one point onto the topic of violence against members of the press.
In a meandering 90-minute rally speech two days before Tuesday’s US presidential election, Trump noted gaps in the glass panes around him.
The former president has survived two attempted assassinations this year, including being grazed in the ear by a gunman’s bullet during a July rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Surveying the gaps, Trump said: “To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news and I don’t mind that so much.”
Unrestrained rhetoric
His rhetoric has become increasingly unrestrained in the campaign‘s final weeks.
Arizona’s top prosecutor on Friday opened an investigation after Trump suggested prominent Republican critic and former congresswoman Liz Cheney should face gunfire in combat.
He said Cheney would not be willing to support foreign wars if she had “nine barrels shooting at her”.
Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung issued a statement after the media remarks on Sunday, saying Trump was looking out for the media’s safety.
“The president’s statement about protective glass placement has nothing to do with the media being harmed or anything else. It was about threats against him that were spurred on by dangerous rhetoric from Democrats,” the statement said.
Trump spent a considerable amount of his speech attacking the news media at the rally, at one point gesturing to TV cameras and saying, “ABC, it’s ABC, fake news, CBS, ABC, NBC. These are, these are, in my opinion, in my opinion, these are seriously corrupt people.”
Harris in Michigan
Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, meanwhile, told a Michigan church congregation on Sunday that God offers America a “divine plan strong enough to heal division”.
The two candidates offered starkly different tones with the campaign almost at an end, as Harris said voters can reject “chaos, fear and hate”.
She concentrated on Michigan, beginning the day with a few hundred parishioners at Detroit’s Greater Emmanuel Institutional Church of God in Christ. It marked the fourth consecutive Sunday that Harris, who is Baptist, has spoken to a Black congregation, reflecting how critical Black voters are across multiple battleground states.
“I see faith in action in remarkable ways,” she said in remarks that quoted the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah. “I see a nation determined to turn the page on hate and division and chart a new way forward. As I travel, I see Americans from so-called red states and so-called blue states who are ready to bend the arc of history toward justice.”
She never mentioned Trump, though she’s certain to return to her more conventional partisan speech in stops later Sunday. But Harris did tell her friendly audience that “there are those who seek to deepen division, sow hate, spread fear and cause chaos.”
The election and “this moment in our nation,” she continued, “has to be about so much more than partisan politics. It must be about the good work we can do together.”
After her Detroit appearance, Harris was due to head to East Lansing, Michigan, a college town in an industrial state that is viewed as a must-win for the Democrat.
Trump was due to speak in Kinston, North Carolina, before ending his day with an evening rally in Macon, Georgia.
Of the seven US states seen as competitive, Georgia and North Carolina are the second-biggest prizes up for grabs on Tuesday, with each holding 16 of the 270 votes a candidate needs to win in the state-by-state Electoral College to secure the presidency. Pennsylvania is first with 19 electors.
With less than 48 hours to go in the US election and more than 77.6m votes already cast, new polling shows Kamala Harris leading among early voters in the country’s battleground states.
The Democratic candidate has an 8% lead among those who have already voted, while her opponent, Donald Trump, is ahead among those who say they are very likely to vote but have not yet done so. The poll, from the New York Times and Siena College, also found Harris was slightly ahead in three swing states, with Trump up in one and the other three too close to call.
With only hours of campaigning left, Harris was speaking in Michigan, while her Republican opponent used a rally in Pennsylvania to complain about gaps in the bulletproof shields surrounding him and suggested he would have no concerns about reporters being shot at if there were another assassination attempt against him.
“To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news and I don’t mind that so much,” he said, adding the press were “seriously corrupt people”. Trump’s communications director claimed in a statement the comments were supposedly an effort to look out for the welfare of the news media.
Here’s what else happened on Sunday:
Donald Trump election news and updates
The Trump campaign claimed the NYT polling and Saturday’s Selzer poll of Iowa for the Des Moines Register were designed to suppress Trump voter turnout by presenting a biased, bleak picture of Trump’s re-election prospects. “No President has done more for FARMERS, and the Great State of Iowa, than Donald J. Trump,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social network.
In Pennsylvania, Trump told supporters that he should have stayed in the White House, despite his losing the 2020 election. “We had the safest border in the history of our country the day that I left,” Trump said.
At a rally in Macon, Georgia, Trump kept up anti-migrant rhetoric and again suggested he would give a role on health policy to Robert F Kennedy Jr. Trump said he told Kennedy: “You work on women’s health, you work on health, you work on what we eat. You work on pesticides. You work on everything.”
After RFK Jrproposed removing fluoride from drinking water on the first day of a new Trump administration, the former president appeared to approve the idea. “Well, I haven’t talked to him about it yet, but it sounds OK to me,” Trump told NBC News. “You know, it’s possible.”
Trump also spoke in Kinston, North Carolina, where he criticised Mitch McConnell, theRepublican Senate minority leader. “Hopefully we get rid of Mitch McConnell pretty soon,” Trump said. Republican voters in Kinston told the Guardian they are ready to fight a “stolen election”.
Kamala Harris election news and updates
In her final rally in Michigan, Harris pledged to do everything in her power to “end the war in Gaza”, as she attempted to appeal to the state’s large Arab American and Muslim American population. Michigan is home to about 240,000 registered Muslim voters, a majority of whom voted for Biden in 2020. But Arab Americans and Muslim Americans in the state have expressed dissatisfaction over the administrations stance on Israel’s war on Gaza.
Harris dodged a question on whether she voted for a controversial tough-on-crime measure that would make it easier for prosecutors to imprison repeat shoplifters and drug users to jail or prison, after submitting her ballot in California. Proposition 36 would roll back provisions of Proposition 47, which downgraded low-level thefts and drug possession to misdemeanours.
At Michigan’s Greater Emmanuel Institutional church of God in Christ in Detroit, Harristold the congregation that God’s plan was to “heal us and bring us together as nation” but that they “must act” to realise that plan.
How US politics got so insulting (Hint: it didn’t start with Trump) – video
Elsewhere on the campaign trail
A US government communications regulator has claimed that Harris’s appearance on Saturday Night Live violates “equal time” rules that govern political programming. Brendan Carr, a commissioner with the federal communications commission (FCC), said “the purpose of the rule is to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct – a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election.”
Iowa can continue challenging the validity of hundreds of ballots from potential noncitizens, a federal judge has ruled. The state has targeted illegal voting but critics said the effort threatened the voting rights of people who have only recently become US citizens.
Oklahoma requires a majority winner in most primary elections. On Tuesday, there will be runoffs in 10 legislative districts where no candidate crossed that threshold in the June 18 primary. They are all for the Republican nomination.
Separately, there is a mayoral election in Tulsa.
Tulsa Mayor
Tulsa is the nation’s 48th largest city, with a population of about 412,000. This is for the city itself, not the associated metro area. Republican G.T. Bynum did not seek a third term in office.
There are seven candidates on the nonpartisan ballot. The three most prominent are Tulsa County Commissioner Karen Keith (D), state Rep. Monroe Nichols (D), and businessman Brent VanNorman (R). Those three participated in a debate earlier in August, after receiving at least 10% support in a qualifying poll.
That poll showed Keith leading with 46% support – well ahead of her two main competitors – and just short of the 50% needed to avoid a runoff.
If a runoff is required, it will take place November 5.
Polls close at 8:00 PM Eastern Time.
State Senate Primary Runoffs
Republicans dominate the Oklahoma State Senate, holding 40 of 48 seats. Members serve four-year staggered terms; the odd numbered districts are up in 2024.
Nominees will be determined Tuesday for these four GOP-held seats. The only incumbent forced into a runoff is Blake Stephens in District 3.
State House Primary Runoffs
Republicans also hold over 80% of the seats in the Oklahoma House of Representatives. Here the partisan advantage is 81-20 over Democrats. Members serve two-year terms.
Nominees will be determined Tuesday for these six GOP-held seats. Incumbents are involved in Districts 32 and 98.
Upcoming Elections and Events
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Presidential Debate (ABC)
Delaware Primary
New Hampshire Primary
Rhode Island Primary
September 17
Pennsylvania State House Districts 195 and 201 Special Election
September 18
New Jersey U.S. House District 10 Special Election
Dearborn, Michigan – For more than a year, Layla Elabed says she and other Arab Americans have been at a “collective funeral”.
“We’re grieving. We’re frustrated. We’re angry. We’re heartbroken. We feel betrayed,” Elabed said, finally taking a breath as she reflected on Israel’s raging wars on Gaza and Lebanon.
And now, with bombs still raining down, she added that Arab American voters were being asked to hit pause on their sorrow and cast a ballot on Tuesday for presidential candidates who do not have a plan “to stop the killing”.
It is a sentiment that reverberates across the large Arab American community in the battleground state of Michigan, where Elabed has been a leader in the Uncommitted Movement, which has aimed to pressure United States President Joe Biden and his vice president and Democratic contender, Kamala Harris, to end their unwavering support for Israel.
Harris has promised to continue arming Israel while her Republican rival, Donald Trump, has a staunchly pro-Israel record despite his claims of wanting to bring “peace” to the region.
Draped in a scarf featuring Palestinian embroidery, known as “tatreez”, Elabed told Al Jazeera that she was leaving the top of the ticket blank.
“I’m skipping it because neither Vice President Harris nor Donald Trump has adopted a policy that clearly says the bombs are going to stop,” said the Detroit area resident, who is a mother of three and the 12th of 14 children of Palestinian immigrants.
Other Arab Americans, however, are making different choices.
Some are backing Harris, arguing that despite her pledge to sustain the flow of US weapons to Israel, the Democrat remains a better choice than Trump on domestic and foreign policy.
Others see Trump’s unpredictability and self-proclaimed status as an antiwar candidate as an opportunity to break away from the Democratic Party and penalise Harris.
Elabed belongs to the third camp: those who argue that neither candidate deserves the community’s votes.
But even within that approach, there are divisions. Some are calling for skipping the presidential race altogether, while others are campaigning for Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
‘We need to respect ourselves’
Overall, however, there seems to be little enthusiasm across the board, underscoring the dilemma Arab Americans face as they struggle to agree on a strategy that could help influence the election and end the US-backed Israeli wars, which have so far killed more than 43,000 people in Gaza and nearly 3,000 in Lebanon.
Alissa Hakim, a Lebanese American university graduate, said she has “no hope whatsoever” about the vote.
Hakim in 2020 cast her first-ever vote in a presidential election, voting for Biden who she believed would be better than Trump. But after four years and a war that many experts have described as a genocide, the 22-year-old said she firmly rejected the “lesser of two evils” argument.
“There’s been such a low bar for our presidential candidates that you want us to vote for you just because you’re not the other person,” said Hakim, sitting in a Yemeni coffee shop with a laptop featuring stickers of the map of historic Palestine.
“It’s made me realise, we need to respect ourselves more than to just sell our vote to whoever says the nicer words,” she told Al Jazeera.
Alissa Hakim, 22, sits at a coffee shop in Dearborn, Michigan, October 31, 2023 [Ali Harb/Al Jazeera]
While Hakim remains undecided, she said her vote would certainly not go for either Trump or Harris.
In Dearborn, a city of 110,000 people known as the Capital of Arab America, both major campaigns are trying to reach out in various ways but their efforts do not appear to be producing a decisive outcome.
With Election Day approaching, Al Jazeera surveyed dozens of residential neighbourhoods in the heavily Arab east side of the city. Signs for school board candidates and Lebanese and Palestinian flags far outnumbered signs for the two major presidential hopefuls.
Biden won more than 80 percent of the votes in predominantly Arab precincts in Dearborn in 2020, according to the city’s election data, helping him win Michigan.
This time, however, Harris is facing an uphill battle in the local community. Even Arab Americans who backed the Democrat in interviews with Al Jazeera have voiced frustration with her positions and acknowledged her campaign’s shortcomings.
Last week, former President Bill Clinton said at a Harris rally in Michigan that Hamas “forces” Israel to kill civilians. He also suggested that Zionism predated Islam in comments that stirred outrage among Arab and Muslim groups.
Harris has also refused to meet advocates from the Uncommitted Movement after her campaign rejected the group’s demand to allow a speech by a Palestinian representative at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August.
At a campaign stop in Michigan on Sunday, Harris was asked if she had a closing case to make to Arab Americans. She said she hoped “to earn” the votes of the community and repeated her position about the “need to end the war” on Gaza and secure the release of dozens of people held captive in the besieged territory.
‘Tough pill to swallow’
Ali Dagher, a local Democratic activist who signed a letter by prominent Arab Americans endorsing Harris, said the community was in “shock” and “deep depression” over the carnage in Gaza and Lebanon.
Dagher told Al Jazeera that endorsing Harris was done in partnership with other groups, including civil rights advocates and labour organisations that see Trump as a threat.
“Another presidency under Donald Trump would be a greater danger, not just on international policy… but also on a domestic level – about human rights, about civil rights, about the environment,” Dagher said.
Harris’s campaign office in Dearborn, Michigan, features signs that include, ‘Arab Americans for Harris’ [Ali Harb/Al Jazeera]
He acknowledged that voting for Harris was a “very tough pill to swallow”, but said the decision was made on the premise that Arab American Democrats would work with their allies to push her to shift US policy on Israel and Palestine.
Some Arab Americans, however, advocate for a divorce from the Democrats altogether, arguing that working within the party’s system has proven futile.
“You do not do the same thing over and over and expect different results,” Hamtramck Mayor Amer Ghalib said at an Al Jazeera town hall in Dearborn earlier this week.
Ghalib, one of the local Arab American officials to have endorsed Trump, said he had opened the channels of communications before the war broke out in an attempt to end the disconnect with the Republican Party after years of political engagement with the Democrats only.
Arab Americans were not always considered a Democrat-leaning constituency. Many Arab voters in the Detroit area backed Republican President George W Bush in 2000. But the 2003 US-led war on Iraq and the so-called “war on terror” shifted the community’s support to the Democratic Party – and not just on the presidential level.
Numerous Arab American politicians in southeast Michigan have been elected to public office as Democrats, including Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib as well as several county commissioners and state lawmakers.
But those same Democratic officials, including Tlaib and Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, who have both served in Michigan’s House of Representatives, have refused to publicly back Harris over the war – signalling yet another shift.
Campaigns target Arab voters
Harris has welcomed the endorsement of Republican former Vice President Dick Cheney – an architect of the post-9/11 era that drove Arab Americans to the Democrats – and campaigned with his daughter, Liz Cheney.
That embrace did not sit well with many in the area, and Republicans are trying to capitalise on that discontent.
“Kamala is campaigning with Muslim-hating warmonger Liz Cheney, who wants to invade practically every Muslim country on the planet,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan in October. “And let me tell you, the Muslims of our country, they see it and they know it.”
A Republican-linked campaign has been aggressively targeting Arab Americans in Michigan with advertisements and text messages highlighting Harris’s ties to the Cheneys as well as her pro-Israel record.
“I’m a volunteer helping elect pro-Israel candidates. Our records show you support VP Harris. Thats [sic] great,” a text message sent to Dearborn residents on Sunday read.
“We need her to continue Biden’s policy of sending aid to Israel so they can continue to [stand] up to terrorism in the Middle East. Do you agree?”
Conversely, Emgage PAC – a Muslim political group backing Harris – has sent mailers to voters in the Detroit area underscoring Trump’s pro-Israel policies and his close relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
A Republican-linked advertisement campaign targeting Arab voters has been underscoring Harris’s pro-Israel record [Ali Harb/Al Jazeera]
‘What’s happening is trauma’
Still, faced with “impossible choices”, many voters say they are not convinced by either effort.
As Trump met a group of Arab Americans in Dearborn on Friday, Leila Alamri, a local health professional, brought a Palestinian flag to the gathering outside the Trump event.
She said her message was about Palestinians, not the US election, adding that she would not vote for either of the two major candidates.
“We’re here just to represent the people of Palestine. We’re not here in support of one candidate or the other,” Alamri told Al Jazeera.
Wissam Charafeddine, a local activist backing the Green Party’s Stein, said the community felt humiliated by people in power and faced a “catastrophe” of retreating from the political system.
“What’s happening is trauma,” he told Al Jazeera.
“Every single person living in this area is affected directly somehow from this war – either by a family member or a friend being killed or by a house or property being destroyed. That’s other than the shared trauma of watching a genocide of children and women that’s being committed in front of their eyes on a daily basis.”
WASHINGTON (AP) — Election Day is nearly upon us. In a matter of hours, the final votes in the 2024 presidential election will be cast.
In a deeply divided nation, the election is a true toss-up between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump.
We know there are seven battleground states that will decide the outcome, barring a major surprise. But major questions persist about the timing of the results, the makeup of the electorate, the influx of misinformation — even the possibility of political violence. At the same time, both sides are prepared for a protracted legal battle that could complicate things further.
Here’s what to watch on the eve of Election Day 2024:
History will be made either way
Given all the twists and turns in recent months, it’s easy to overlook the historical significance of this election.
Harris would become the first female president in the United States’ 248-year history. She would also be the first Black woman and person of South Asian descent to hold the office. Harris and her campaign have largely played down gender and race fearing that they might alienate some supporters. But the significance of a Harris win would not be lost on historians.
A Trump victory would represent a different kind of historical accomplishment. He would become the first person convicted of a felony elected to the U.S. presidency, having been convicted of 34 felony counts in a New York hush-money case little more than five months ago.
Trump, who is still facing felony charges in at least two separate criminal cases, argued that he is the victim of a politicized justice system. And tens of millions of voters apparently believe him — or they’re willing to overlook his extraordinary legal baggage.
How long will it take to know the winner?
Election Day in the United States is now often considered election week as each state follows its own rules and practices for counting ballots — not to mention the legal challenges — that can delay the results. But the truth is, nobody knows how long it will take for the winner to be announced this time.
In 2020, The Associated Press declared President Joe Biden the winner on Saturday afternoon — four days after polls closed. But even then, The AP called North Carolina for Trump 10 days after Election Day and Georgia for Biden 16 days later after hand recounts.
Four years earlier, the 2016 election was decided just hours after most polls closed. The AP declared Trump the winner on election night at 2:29 a.m. (it was technically Wednesday morning on the East Coast).
This time, both campaigns believe the race is extremely close across the seven swing states that are expected to decide the election, barring a major surprise: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The size of the map and the tightness of the race make it hard to predict when a winner could be declared.
What to know about the 2024 Election
Where can I find early clues about how the contest might unfold?
Look to two East Coast battleground states, North Carolina and Georgia, where the results could come in relatively quickly. That doesn’t mean we’ll get the final results in those states quickly if the returns are close, but they are the first swing states that might offer a sense of what kind of night we’re in for.
To go deeper, look to urban and suburban areas in the industrial North and Southeast, where Democrats have made gains since 2020.
In North Carolina, Harris’ margins in Wake and Mecklenburg Counties, home to the state capital of Raleigh and the state’s largest city, Charlotte, respectively, will reveal how much Trump will need to squeeze out of the less-populated rural areas he has dominated.
In Pennsylvania, Harris needs heavy turnout in deep blue Philadelphia, but she’s also looking to boost the Democrats’ advantage in the arc of suburban counties to the north and west of the city. She has campaigned aggressively in Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties, where Biden improved on Clinton’s 2016 winning margins. The Philadelphia metro area, including the four collar counties, accounts for 43 percent of Pennsylvania’s vote.
Elsewhere in the Blue Wall, Trump needs to blunt Democratic growth in Michigan’s key suburban counties outside of Detroit, especially Oakland County. He faces the same challenge in Wisconsin’s Waukesha County outside of Milwaukee.
Where are the candidates?
Trump will likely spend the very early hours of Election Day in Michigan, where he is scheduled to hold a final late-night rally in Grand Rapids as has become his tradition.
The Republican candidate plans to spend the rest of the day in Florida, where he is expected to vote in person — despite previously saying he would vote early. He’s scheduled to hold a campaign watch party in Palm Beach Tuesday night.
Harris plans to attend an Election Night party at Howard University in Washington, a historically Black university where she graduated with a degree in economics and political science in 1986 and was an active member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
Aside from Howard, she has no public schedule announced for Election Day.
Harris said Sunday that she had “just filled out” her mail-in ballot and it was “on its way to California.”
Who’s left to show up on Election Day?
On the eve of Election Day, it’s unclear which voters will show up to cast ballots on Tuesday.
More than 77 million people participated in early voting — either in person or through the mail. So many people already cast ballots that some officials say the polls in states like Georgia might be a “ghost town” on Election Day.
One major reason for the surge is that that Trump has generally encouraged his supporters to vote early this time, a reversal from 2020 when he called on Republicans to vote only in-person on Election Day. The early vote numbers confirm that millions of Republicans have heeded Trump’s call in recent weeks.
The key question, however, is whether the surge of Republicans who voted early this time will ultimately cannibalize the number of Republicans who show up on Tuesday.
There are also shifts on the Democratic side. Four years ago, as the pandemic lingered, Democrats overwhelmingly cast their ballots early. But this time around, without the public health risk, it’s likely that more Democrats will show up in person on Election Day.
That balance on both sides is critical as we try to understand the early returns. And it’s on the campaigns to know which voters they still need to turn out on Tuesday. On that front, Democrats may have an advantage.
Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee have outsourced much of their get-out-the-vote operation operation to outside groups, including one funded largely by billionaire Trump ally Elon Musk that’s facing new questions about its practices. Harris’ campaign, by contrast, is running a more traditional operation that features more than 2,500 paid staffers and 357 offices in battleground states alone.
Could there be unrest?
Trump has been aggressively promoting baseless claims in recent days questioning the integrity of the election. He falsely insists that he can lose only if Democrats cheat, even as polls show that show the race is a true toss-up.
Trump could again claim victory on election night regardless of the results, just as he did in 2020.
Such rhetoric can have serious consequences as the nation saw when Trump loyalists stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 in one of the darkest days in modern American history. And unfortunately, there is still a potential of further violence this election season.
The Republican National Committee will have thousands of “election integrity” poll monitors in place on Tuesday searching for any signs of fraud, which critics fear could lead to harassment of voters or election workers. In some key voting places, officials have requested the presence of sheriff deputies in addition to bulletproof glass and panic buttons that connect poll managers to a local 911 dispatcher.
At the same time, Trump allies note that he has faced two assassination attempts in recent months that raise the possibility of further threats against him. And police in Washington and other cities are preparing for the possibility of serious Election Day unrest.
As always, it’s worth noting that a broad coalition of top government and industry officials, many of them Republicans, found that the 2020 election was the “most secure” in American history.”
___ AP writers Tom Beaumont and Will Weissert in Washington and Jill Colvin in Grand Rapids, Michigan contributed.
